This was, most likely, the best
Parsifal I have ever heard. Perhaps it
was not quite the best I have seen, but it was not so very far off. Stefan
Herheim’s Bayreuth production remains – well, its unanswerable self, or rather
its self which permits of so many questions and answers that it continues to
develop in the mind long after it was last seen in
2012. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging is a masterpiece, too: very different,
of course, as it should be. Indeed, of the post-Herheim stagings I have seen,
it is unquestionably the greatest. Returning to it, following its
2015 premiere, Tcherniakov has, in good Werkstatt
Bayreuth fashion, made some changes. I am not convinced that they are all
for the better, but then nor was I with Herheim. They nevertheless keep one on
one’s toes, or keep one’s eyes on whatever they should be on, and forestall any
disastrous lapse into ritualism.

Not, of course, that the
audience by and large noticed. The preposterous prohibition on applause was
still being enforced by those who may know some Wagner but understand nothing
of him. Protecting a ritual which has long lost its justification, if ever it
had one; mindless veneration of a sinister cult: yes, look around you and see
our present-day guardians of the Grail. One does not even have to have a
developmental view of an artwork to appreciate the utter folly of treating the
first act as a Christian rite. One simply has to listen to the words. What
Wagner presents is heretical in the extreme, as much a Feuerbachian inversion,
even a black mass, as anything else. And it is a representation, a dramatisation,
not the thing itself. Is that so difficult for someone sitting in a theatre to understand? Do people attending a
performance of Don Giovanni think the
singer playing the Commendatore has really just been murdered? Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, this is
not the St Matthew Passion, for which
there are perfectly good reasons to behave quite differently; you are not part
of a congregation. By all means, feel no need to applaud; that is your
prerogative. However, you have no right to enforce your uncomprehending choice
upon others; even Bayreuth has given up on that. If you doubt me, read The Master himself: his Religion und Kunst.

The great irony is, of course,
that a few moments’ attention to Tcherniakov’s staging would have told them the
same too. Here we have a religious community of a decidedly Russian nature: a
community of Old Believers, possibly. Khovanschina
certainly comes to mind. Yet it is clearly a sham. To us, to the leaders,
perhaps to those participating; that latter point is unclear, productively so.
But Titurel’s ritualistic staging of his own death in the first act and re-emergence
from the coffin once ‘it’ is all over stands at the very heart of the drama. He
is a sinister, charismatic dictator: the cult leader we all know and fear.
Moreover, his sadism in insisting, for whatever reasons, that his son, Amfortas
go through what he must time and time again, chills to the bone. The
identification between Father and Son of the (un-)Holy Trinity is clear, not
least through Amfortas’s Christ-like stance. Where Wagner’s Third Act makes the
still extraordinary claim that it is necessary to prevent Christ from ascending
to the Cross in the first place, here we see the consequences either of that
failure to prevent – perhaps, or, as we shall find out, chez Tcherniakov, perhaps not, to be reversed – or of a descent
into meaningless from something that perhaps once was achieved. The child, even
when grown adult, is the victim. For Hegel and his followers, amongst whom we
should certainly count Wagner, the agony of the god-man on the Cross was a
paradigmatic case in every sense. As with most great productions, we find,
dialectically, fidelity in infidelity: perhaps all the more so experiencing the
work on Good Friday.

Parsifal (Andreas Schager) and Flowermaidens

Freud is, of course, never far
away in Parsifal; nor is he here.
That abuse is paralleled, echoed, even prefigured in the extraordinary Second
Act. Where Tcherniakov’s sets had previously offered the backdrop for Gurnemanz’s
slide-show of past Parsifal glories,
Wagner’s own inspirations coming back to life (possibly deceptively, not unlike
a visual game of Call my Bluff), now
they seem literally to have been whitewashed, as the nightmare of child abuse
is re-enacted and intensified. Kundry, who has a past not only with Amfortas,
not only with the others mentioned when Klingsor summons her, but also, most
intriguingly and frighteningly, with Gurnemanz too, brings Parsifal to the
realisation that he had no choice but to kill his mother. In the show enacted
before him and us, the girl we see – sister or girl-next-door? – arouses him,
he touches her, and then Herzeleide walks in. The girl having been struck by
his mother and banished, he tries it again with her. Does he know what he is
doing when touching her breasts? Herzeleide certainly does, and so she must
die. Orchestrating the show is, of course, Klingsor, whose paedophilia and
exploitation of paedophilia are shockingly clear – perhaps shockingly too from
our instant reaction to his stereotypical ‘weirdo from around the corner’
costume. Is our initial rush to judgement part of the problem? Perhaps; perhaps
not. Flowermaidens with dolls, themselves dolls, initially having been the
objects of potential rescue by our have-a-go hero, Parsifal, yet casually
forgotten still more quickly, perhaps, than Herzeleide had been, Kundry was
always going to have to take centre-stage with her bag of tricks, clutched
close to her during the preceding act. I am not quite sure that the more
conventional method of seduction on offer this time around was so successful,
Kundry, as so often, shedding her outer layer; that coat having been left on
all the time in 2015, it is now shed to reveal a blue dress. Startling yes,
unlike everything else, but perhaps more of a tradition that Tcherniakov had
initially seemed willing to resist.

Not to worry: much remains to
provoke, not least the offstage kiss. What happened? We shall never know. It
traumatises, though, damaging yet another human life, just as the panoply of
events, ‘real’ and ‘remembered’ has been doing during both acts – and will
continue to do so in the third. That, I think, might be the reason for the
relative lack of ‘drama’ in that final act. What might be taken as running out
steam is part of the point. It lulls us into a false sense of security, only to
be cruelly woken up by Amfortas’s searching the coffin for the missing Titurel,
and finally for Gurnemanz’s closing murder of Kundry. Whatever it is that has
been going on has led, once again, to the most extreme of measures; Parsifal
might be doing the right thing in carrying her away, but is he as clueless as
he was before, whatever the claims of durch
Mitleid wissend? Kundry now, unlike 2015, appears already to be dying, before
Gurnemanz reaches her. Has she tricked him, tricked us; has she actually found
agency through premature death? Or does that not just return us to Wagner’s
highly problematic insistence upon female sacrifice? That I found an intriguing
addition to the production; I was less clear why she does not take the doll out
of her bag again in this act. I need to see it again, I think: just as well it
is programmed for Holy Week, 2017.

None of that would make so
searing an impact, of course, without outstanding performances from all
concerned. Daniel Barenboim’s conducting of the superlative Staatskapelle
Berlin confirmed that he is surely the greatest Wagner conductor alive, or at
least at work. (I think we can sadly presume that we shall hear no more Wagner
from Bernard Haitink, although we can hope to hear much else, in the concert
hall.) Barenboim’s command of line was here beyond reproach, but never at the
expense of drama, of ‘deeds of music made visible’ – or here, in a further
dialectical twist, made once again audible. It is his near-Furtwänglerian
ability to combine so many musico-dramatic imperatives that most impresses, or
rather that one hardly notices, so ‘right’ does it seem. And so ‘right’ does
this great orchestra sound, its dark German strings guardians, or better
developers, of tradition. They know, and so do we, that Mahler, Schoenberg,
Boulez, et al., have extended our
ears; they know, and so do we, that Mahler, Schoenberg, Boulez, et al., could not have done so without
Wagner. Wagner’s orchestral Greek Chorus deepens the deception onstage and its
implications.

Klingsor (Tómas Tómasson) and the Flowermaidens

Once again, then, the dialectic
between fidelity and infidelity thickened, yet also clarified, the plot. The
actual chorus was magnificent too. Tcherniakov’s blocking is that of an Old
Master – almost literally, in the not-quite-Biblical scenes we see painted
onstage, especially at the horrifying close. They look outwards, frozen,
perhaps in fear: what are we to make of it? Their singing was equally
impressive; indeed, there was no distinction readily to be made between the
visual and aural aspects of their work, which is just as it should be.

Andreas Schager’s Parsifal was
truly a thing of wonder, without question the greatest I have ever heard. The
beauty and strength of tone to be heard from this truest of Heldentenors, is
joined by perhaps a greater variegation still than last year. His acting the
gawky adolescent was again uncanny (unheimlich,
one might better say). So too was the transformed man of peace (or of
fanaticism?) of the third act. What did it mean, the way he was looking at,
singing at, Kundry? There was much for us to ponder, those of us who cared to
look and to listen. René Pape, despite the occasional verbal slip, made still more
of his words than last year as Gurnemanz. (Again, I hasten to add, that is not
a criticism of 2015, more a judgement that this was better still.) His beauty of
tone is the stuff of legend, and so again it was here. He clearly benefited
greatly from Tcherniakov’s direction, just as Tcherniakov greatly benefited
from his artistry. Wolfgang Koch was, I think, certainly of healthier voice
than last year; hearing a Wotan, who sometimes sounded just like a Wotan, in
the role offered all manner of interesting critical possibilities. Moreover, one
felt, almost literally, his agony. The nastiness, the sadism, in their
different yet ultimately similar ways, of Tómas Tómasson’s Klingsor and
Matthias Hölle’s Titurel were crucial elements of the unfolding drama; theirs
were no ‘minor’ roles.

Waltraud Meier’s Kundry was
always going to be special; I heard her penultimate performance, her last
hurrah reserved for Easter Monday. As ever, there was no gainsaying her
commitment, especially during the second act, in which she threw everything she
had, and then some, into what seemed like the performance of a lifetime,
however many performances of a lifetime she had actually given. Comparisons
with Anja Kampe last year would be superfluous, even if Kampe had not been ill;
both are great artists, but the occasion of bidding farewell to a role with
which Meier has been for so long been so closely associated was something of
which no one would have been unaware. No one who attended this Parsifal, who watched and listened, will
forget the almost incredibly high standards of musical performance and dramatic
intelligence from all concerned.

3 comments:

Dear Mark,Many thanks for drawing my attention to this production last year. I attended this year, Good Friday. I agree almost 100% with what you have written. This production has troubled and disturbed me since my return, and i think i can say it is the greatest production i have seen. Musically it was incomparable and i have heard Solti, Haitink, Goodall and Abaddo in the theatre. Tell me, was the Herheim production never released on DVD?

Thank you! So glad you got as much out of it as I did. Some impressive comparisons there! Alas, the Herheim production was never released; it was going to be, but a spanner was put in the works and there now seems no likelihood of that happening. A tragedy, which someone really should put right.

This is a production that I too hope to see one of these days, but I was visiting friends in Sweden this Easter, so my Parsifal took place at the Kungligan Operan in Stockholm on Easter Monday. The production was by Christof Loy, a fact that troubled me in advance, since I hadn't been convinced by his attempt to domesticate Tristan and Isolde at Covent Garden. However, I found his Parsifal much more persuasive. Again there was an effort to domesticate things, so that Guernemanz seemed to lead a household, a family, of devout country folk - one could take them for a minority religious group like the Amish. But there was also a very strong sense of the cruelty of Amfortas' situation. He was a literal Christ figure here, with crown of thorns and gaping side wound, huddled in a blue cloak that reflected the hues of Renaissance paintings - yet it was left open to the spectator to take this as a critique of Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement in itself, or as a suggestion that the Grail Knights are participating in a blasphemous perversion of Christianity. I shall not forget Peter Mattei's anguished performance in the role.

The ending (the detail of which I won't spoil) was extraordinary - it offered, in one sense, a defiantly secular reading, but one which at the same time acknowledged the way in which Christianity has shaped Western culture, including, of course, the opera we had just seen and heard. This was, indeed, not a Good Friday Parsifal, but an Easter Monday Parsifal.

The question of applause at the end of Act 1 came up in conversation with the friend who was accompanying me before the performance. We agreed that we would follow the custom of the house and do as the rest of the audience did. But Loy made his preference clear: after the music stopped at the end of Act 1, several of the singers remained on stage, and there was was felt like a minute or so of stage business, with the lights eventually coming up while this business was ongoing. There couldn't have been a clearer indication that we were meant not to applaud, but the audience didn't seem to understand the signal. So while everyone else clapped, my friend and I sat in silence - not out of any sense of misplaced mystical piety, but out of respect to the director's intentions.